A note about the erasure poem ‘Heart Heal’

An erasure poem is part of a tradition of using pre-existing texts, stripping away some of the words, and revealing a new creation with what remains. The erasure part echoes the kind of blacking out of text used when classified information is made public. A good definition can be found on the Found Poetry Review’s website at http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/about-found-poetry.

My erasure poem comes from page 46 of the book The Art of the Deal, attributed to but not really written at all by Donald Trump.

My first idea was to work with Trump’s tweets and his use (overuse) of not just the word “sad“ but also, and often, followed by an exclamation point.

When I read, I usually sound out the words in mind, so “sad!” often sounds like an overexcited shout, like something a drunk person would say and you don’t know if they are excited by the sadness of whatever it is they are talking about, or if they are just excited to have an audience.

Here’s the thing. As I kept reading tweet after tweet, I felt myself descend into feelings of despair. His writing is vain, petty, grotesque, misguided, short-sighted, argumentative, blaming, scape-goating, petulant, snappish, whiny, ill-informed, and stupid. The tweets are Trump unfiltered. There is no central point or rationale, except me, me, me – which exemplifies, I think, the worst of his generation, the boomers.

The writing isn’t witty, smart, or fun. I value those three things so much that I abandoned even continuing to think about creating a project involving those tweets. My thoughts were along the lines of a list of everything that makes him sad, or an erasure poem with graphics of the tweets, but only leaving “sad!” behind.

Then I thought about The Art of the Deal. Looked it up on Amazon and took a screenshot of a random page and starting taking words away.

I know Trump didn’t actually write the book. And the book being a distillation, a filtered version of Donald, was easier to read through. Yet I still felt a sense of power in taking away words and of repurposing them to craft a new kind of message of defiance and resistance.